2018 Artists' Residency

This year's biennial residency brings together three artists whose work focuses primarily on sculpture. Drawing upon personal memories and banal details of everyday life, they appropriate, transform and juxtapose mundane objects into peculiar and minimalist sculptural arrangements. Through the months of May and June, Rebecca Ackroyd, Alexandre da Cunha and Charles Harlan will be based on Sarvisalo responding to the unique location and the wider cultural landscape in Finland.

Since 2010 the Collection has been inviting international artists to the island to undertake residencies as an alternative way of supporting artists, giving them the time and space to think and create freely, without the immediate pressure of exhibition-making. Spending anywhere from a week to a month on the residency, many of the artists use their time here to produce site-responsive works, while others have proposed projects to be realised in the future.

Charles Harlan (27 May - 11 June)

Harlan’s practice is anchored in a nearly anthropological investigation of daily life artefacts. He frequently uses industrial objects as ladders, shipping palettes, boats, marble countertops, and bathtubs as readymade elements. Marked by a desire to unthread both the narrative of civilization and individuals, his works infuse everyday objects with new meaning and connotations.

Rebecca Ackroyd (5 June - 20 June)

Ackroyd’s practice involves digging down into existing objects and memories and reconfiguring them in to something new. Her installations offer dream-like fictional landscapes informed by tough realities. Through shifting scales and moods, from the arrestingly bold and absurd to the subtle and intimate, the work pursues a feminist exploration of the psychology of space and the ownership of bodies.

Alexandre da Cunha (5 June - 25 June)

Through a process of collage of different everyday objects, material and citations, Alexandre da Cunha creates sculptural works that engage with the history of abstraction and minimalism. By doing so, his work opens up reflection on the cultural and social significance of the appropriated objects, while inserting them into new hierarchies of value.